Life cycle analysis (LCA) has been practiced since the 1960s. When in 1969, a well-known beverage company commissioned a comparative study of traditional, re-usable glass bottles vs. plastic bottles, this arguably marked the debut of LCA as integral to product development even for mass market consumer goods and services companies. More recently, the more widespread public awareness of the risks of global warming and the role of anthropogenic green house gas (GHG) emissions has prompted a renaissance of LCA concepts in the form of standardized carbon footprinting (CF) of products and services.
Companies usually seek to quantify CFs for one or more of the following reasons: (i) internal transparency and identification of carbon reduction strategies; (ii) communication of results to external stakeholders such as environmental monitoring groups, or to apply for certification; or (iii) requests from a company's corporate customers for scope 3-relevant data, to use in their corporate carbon accounting.
While LCA has continuously evolved, prompting both often re-cited criticism and improvement, the new need for accurate and comparable CFs has catalyzed efforts to overcome many of LCA's traditional shortcomings and provided standards for CF. Today, companies embarking on CF benefit from detailed protocols, industry/sector specific guidance, software packages, and databases that provide support with the following: (i) choice of functional unit; (ii) system boundaries; (iii) emission factors (EFs) of materials and activities; and (iv) specialty issues such as recycling and biogenic carbon and storage. Crucially, guidelines also provide a more head-on approach to materiality and realistically achievable levels of accuracy. For example, the rounding rules of the UK Carbon Trust imply that even a best-practice CF will have a residual uncertainty of 5-10%.
While the above developments represent tremendous progress and improvements over the status quo even just a few years ago, quantifying the CFs for hundreds or thousands of individual products/services is currently impossible, short of a massive buildup of a company's dedicated personnel and LCA expertise. Specifically, practitioners today face two fundamental obstacles when performing CF at the scale of large companies:
1) required time and expertise: collecting, organizing, and validating LCA inventory (easily hundreds of data items for a single product/service), as well as mapping to EFs, typically takes hundreds of man hours and specialized knowledge; and
2) lack of uniformity and integrated platform: CF today is usually performed as a series of one-off efforts, e.g., using non-interlinked, separate spreadsheets for the CF of each new product/service; once the practitioner has completed data entry and calculation for one product, to the desired accuracy, the practitioner moves on to the next product, often without maximizing the re-use of any previously collected information.
The obstacles related to known LCA practices result in missed opportunities that currently prevent CF from realizing its full spectrum of possible benefits, which include the following:
(1) What-if impacts across products, carbon management, and cost-benefit evaluations: Arguably, one of the greatest opportunities of CF is to enable a company to identify and prioritize reduction strategies. However, because the CFs for a set of different products are usually calculated in a set of non-integrated files, it is difficult to quantify the combined impact of a reduction strategy. For example, counting all impacts on raw materials, transportation, and disposal, what would be the total company-wide GHG reductions if all PET packaging were made 15% lighter? What if all factories in a country moved 30% of their primary energy consumption to hydropower-rich electricity? Which LCA stages in the supply chain—measured across all products or by business line—offer the largest reduction potential? Given an assumed carbon price, would the costs for required upgrades (e.g., modified energy mix, packaging, or ingredients) be a worthwhile investment?
(2) Flexibility vis-à-vis regulatory change: Standards for CF are still evolving. With current practice, a future change in the CF “accounting rules” would mean tremendous time and resource effort on behalf of a company, to essentially fix the manual CF calculations for hundreds of products/services. This poses significant “regulatory” risk.
(3) Synergy with corporate carbon accounting (“corporate footprint”): There is a direct relationship between the various LCA stages that count toward a product/service CF and those that count towards a corporate footprint. Therefore, there are significant synergies between the data collection and analyses for product/service CFs and the scopes 1, 2, and 3 of corporate footprints. Current CF practice often lacks the coverage, uniformity, or transparency that would enable the company to make use of such synergies.